We need to solve a couple of problems first. Right now, standing up a web host correctly is difficult. Getting the settings right is troublesome, buying a domain can be expensive and hard to set up, and directing the DNS of that domain to your home's internet (where most homes, at least in the US, are dynamic addresses) is very difficult. Video hosting is a tricky experience. Delivering quickly at multiple bitrates in an easy to use interface is hard. There is a reason why YouTube, Netflix, and more spend a lot of time working on improving video quality while reducing data usage. Finally, if everyone hosts their one videos, how will discovery work?

Remember WinMX in the early 2000's? It was mostly used for sharing music. That had good discoverability for self hosted files.

Good point. And all of this is exactly what needs to be resolved.

How? I would love to see some initiatives in that area (beside IPFS)

There are two hard parts: security and discoverability. As a programmer I know 95% of what is needed already exists, what is left is security and some ease of use.

plex (https://www.plex.tv/) already has most of what you need. However if I put a video of my kid's first words on plex how does grandma find it?

I would love to see it, too. The good news is that these are all solved problems. It's more about tailoring the information and distributing it. It could be the online equivalent of a Sears article on how to build a shed.

I personally really enjoyed the "Links" sections at the bottoms of everyone's Web 1.0 pages.

Why host videos rather than torrent them?

I should have expanded on this in my post, but I judge the level of difficulty on whether someone's grandmother would be able to upload a video from their iPhone/iPad/Android, for example a cute video of their grandson/granddaughter.

It might be easy for us to upload a torrent, but to most others, it is extremely hard, if not impossible.

The other problem with torrents is that it relies on reseeding. Preservation of content is a problem with torrents.

What is it about torrents that are specifically difficult for grandmothers? I've used several torrent clients and none of them asked me my age or gender, much less whether I had grandchildren.

The problem is that you need to show them how to transfer the video to their computer, how to create a torrent for it, and how to send out the magnet or torrent link/file. I would never be able to get any of my grandparents to follow and remember any of those steps, let alone teach them why they need to leave their computer on for me to access it. The entire process is painful. I can teach them to upload to Facebook or YouTube easily. Torrents, not so much.

That may be true of your grandmother, but what makes you say it's true of grandmothers in general?

How is that a problem? Nothing is stopping people from seeding their content themselves or archiving it...

Yes, but it relies on people actively doing so. For example, look at the following torrent of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in 3D [1]. Yes, it is an illegal video copy, but a video that there are no legal ways to access anymore. This torrent has no seeders and because I don't have a copy, I therefore can't seed it.

[1]: https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/7487775/2012_Olympics_Openi...

How is this going to be a problem if the owner/publisher takes care of the seeding (i.e. they run a seeding node instead of or in addition to serving the content the traditional way)? IP laws have almost nothing to do with the way the content is delivered...

Most consumer internet contracts contain clauses that prohibit hosting. Independent ISP's 20 years ago didn't have such clauses.

Yes they did. And we ignored it back then as well.

Largely, the TOS/“contract” doesn’t define host clearly. So you need to get real specific what you mean.

Blocking an ftp server because it’s a host would also block Apple iChat video because it’s “hosting” a video stream.

For my ISP (ATT/uverse) they prevent hosting a commercial service, otherwise they aren’t specific. And it’s not for hosting purposes, it’s for SLA purposes so they aren’t responsible for revenue loss from system outage.

Part of the problem is how asymmetric internet connections are now. My home connection may be 150 Mbit down, but I only get about 5 Mbit upload. And I gather this is fairly standard for most (American, at any rate) ISPs.

I have the high end speed of internet from Comcast, but if you read their Acceptable Use Policy for XFINITY® Internet,

Technical Restrictions:

use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;

Who cares? ToSes should simply be ignored

Discoverability is already pretty shitty on YouTube, imagine if everyone had its own server. How do you find anything relevant? We need to solve distributed search first, maybe something like the YaCy project.

Yes... I'd always been the type of person that ran some kind of server with network services in a DMZ on my home network. Of late I dismantled everything because it just isn’t worth the (perceived) hassle anymore. Most of all, cloud services and so forth have made us lazy.

Check out Plex

I'm not sure Plex would be a good option for sharing stuff with others. And on that note how many people actually have static IPs these days that allows them to easily host services like that? As the IP shortage worsens expect more carrier grade NATs to pop up.

You don't need a static IP with Plex, only a Plex account with granted access

Side node: if you doin't have ipv6 ask your ISP when it is coming.